Chief Minister Siddaramaiah may not carry a tech-savvy image, but the 10th budget he presented on Friday is peppered with tech-based projects. Spread across sectors from agriculture and revenue to education and culture, they number well over 30.
While the budget proposes to set up digital library and decision support system for scientific watershed management under the head of agriculture, it sets aside Rs. 10 crore to fit ear-rings with unique identification (UID) to cattle to track services provided to them.
There are tech-based projects in education and health sectors too.
“Tele” appears to be a pet prefix for many projects, with promise of push for tele-radiology, tele-medicine and tele-education for schools in association with IIM-B. There is a special emphasis on e-learning (alongside spoken English) under Social Welfare head for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, backward classes, and minority students.
An e-hospital software is to be used to document health information of patients in government hospitals, and e-linking between ultrasound scanning centres and Health Department is proposed to prevent female foeticide.
Unusually, Kannada and Culture head too has a tech-touch this time with Rs. 2 crore for developing online encyclopaedia ‘Kanaja’ and a proposal to hold virtual Kannada classes.
Proposals under the Revenue head are particularly noteworthy with five tech-based projects proposed “to achieve transparency, simplification of revenue administration and to make access of services to public easy”.
The budget proposes computerised grievance redressal for electricity-related complaints of consumers and even new software to purchase sand online.
Key issues
Connectivity, power supply and maintenance may be keys to ensure these initiatives work on the ground, and Karnataka’s mixed experience with initiatives such as Mahiti Sindhu (computer-based education) is a case in point. However, experts feel that mainstreaming of technology is a good move.
“The best approach will be to provide market incentives to the private sector, especially start-ups, while simultaneously protecting the public interest via mandates for free/open source software, open standards, open content, open data etc. in the publicly funded projects as is the case internationally,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society.
